Syntactic and strategic forces in picture naming: gender retrieval in blocked priming experiments

Abstract

One of the core issues in research on the processing of grammatical gender in language production is whether it is represented as an abstract node or whether it is an inherent property of the noun. Interpretation of the relevant data is often complicated by the fact that they could theoretically concern either gender competition or determiner competition. In the present Study, participants named Pictures in pre-defined sets, using gender-marked demonstrative determiners. We independently varied the number of determiners and the number of gender classes in a given set. There were clear effects of the number of determiners (response set size). Evidence for effects of gender was less conclusive. Time course analyses revealed that a potential effect of gender is very subtle and highly Susceptible to strategies that participants develop in the Course of the experiment.